Towards a student strike for Palestine!
Communist Revolution Newsletter
Towards a student strike for Palestine!
The genocide in Gaza continues. According to a new study by The Lancet, more than 186,000 have been killed. Millions have been displaced.
Netanyahu claims that this will continue into 2025 and the war may even extend into Lebanon.
Without the support from western states like Canada, this brutal campaign would not last a day. Indeed, the monster of Israeli imperialism has accomplices here in Canada. The Canadian government, Canadian corporations and Canadian universities are all complicit in this crime.
For months now, millions have demonstrated against this horror. But so far, the powers that be have ignored us.
The youth instinctively understood that if they won’t listen we must make them listen! Through the encampment movement, students in countries all over the world tried to end the complicity of the universities in the crimes of Israeli imperialism.
However, most encampments occurred at the end of the semester, remained very small and failed to spread. This allowed the university administrations, in league with the state, to disperse them in one way or another—sometimes even with batons and pepper spray.
Take the movement to the next level!
More and more people have seen through the lies of the zionists. According to polls, the vast majority of young people in Canada oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.
This fall, we have an opportunity to take the movement to the next level. Hundreds of thousands of students will be flooding onto Canadian campuses. Many of them will be thinking about the fact that their university is invested in the Israeli war machine.
Unite and strike for Palestine!
This fall, let’s build a movement on the campuses so powerful that they cannot ignore it.
The university administrations could ignore us when we camped on their front lawns. Let them try to ignore us when we shut down the campuses entirely!
This is an open appeal. We call on all student unions and pro-Palestinian groups on all campuses across the country to unite to organize a student strike for Palestine.
Not all pro-Palestinian groups agree on everything. However, our differences are nothing compared to what unites us against the Zionists, the imperialists and their friends on campuses. We can all agree that our strength is in numbers. Let’s do everything in our collective power to bring the mass of students into action.
As students and workers in the west, we have a vital role to play in the struggle against imperialism. If we shut down the campuses, they will be forced to listen to us. If we spread the movement to the working class, we can hit the imperialist accomplices in their profits. And last but not least, if we spread the movement across borders, we can shake the entire imperialist world and stop the Israeli war machine!
Program for a student strike
1. Unite to strike!
It’s been nearly a year and the genocide in Gaza continues. The Canadian government is complicit, Canadian corporations are complicit and Canadian universities are complicit. They have proven that they won’t listen unless we make them listen. This fall, we call on all student unions and pro-Palestinian groups to unite and organize a student strike to shutdown the campuses.
2. End the support for the Zionist war machine!
All of the institutions of Canadian capitalism are complicit in the genocide of the Palestinians. Canadian universities are invested in companies involved in the Israeli military and settlements. But this is just a small element. The Canadian government has been a stalwart supporter of Israel since day one economically, politically, diplomatically and militarily. We fight to end any and all support for the Zionist war machine.
3. End the repression of the Palestine movement!
The ruling class in Canada, including all major political parties have united to smear, slander and repress the Palestine movement. False allegations of anti-semitism, combined with arrests, fines and academic punitive measures have been meted out against pro-palestinian activists. We fight for the freedom to speak out against and to protest this genocide. We will fight any and all measures put in place to silence us.
4. End the Genocide!
The Zionists are trying to finish what they started 76 years ago. They have made this abundantly clear in words and in deeds. Genocide is not something that happened once long ago. It is occurring right now before our very eyes. We fight to end the genocide and liberate the Palestinians.
Fight imperialism and war! Workers of the world unite! – RCI statement
Capitalism is a sick system which outlived its useful purpose a long time ago. In the epoch of its senile decline it breeds war, racism, poverty, and hunger. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is characterised by the struggle between different gangs of capitalist robbers for the sharing out of the loot. Today, as the loot shrinks under the impact of the crisis of capitalism, their struggle intensifies and we see a renewed drive towards militarism and war.
The war on Gaza has given us the most graphic demonstration of the savagery of capitalism. The western imperialists have given their wholehearted, enthusiastic support to, and material assistance in, the genocidal slaughter of 40,000 defenceless men, women, and children by the Israeli war machine. In so doing, they have exploded all their hypocritical talk about ‘western values’, the ‘rules based international order’, and the inviolability of human rights.
All their sermons and crocodile tears about Russian war crimes in Ukraine have been exposed as hypocrisy. It is not for Ukrainian freedom or sovereignty, but to weaken Russia as a rival power that the Ukrainian people have been thrown as cannon fodder into another imperialist slaughter.
These wars, in Gaza and Ukraine, are just two examples of the barbarism that capitalism is whipping up across the globe. Gaza, Ukraine, Congo, Sudan, rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait, wars and civil wars in over 30 countries around the world: this is the picture of the future that capitalism has in store for mankind.
In the epoch of capitalism’s death agony, reactionary and imperialist wars are spreading. Millions of ordinary poor and working-class people are the ones paying for it: in deaths, injuries and disease; through the mass displacement of 117 million people and counting; in the destruction of livelihoods and higher prices. All this for the profits of an unelected, unaccountable handful of billionaire parasites.
But there is another side to this process. Millions, even hundreds of millions, are being radicalised. They are looking for a fighting lead against militarism, against war, and against imperialism. The millions protesting the Gaza war and the mass encampment movement proved that.
The time is ripe for a broad-based, international campaign around a clear programme to fight militarism and imperialism. Towards this end, the Revolutionary Communist International proposes the following programme as the starting point for such a campaign, and we call upon every individual or organisation seriously opposed to imperialist war to contact us, to put their name to the same campaign, and to join us in this task.
We aim to reach into every campus, school, workers’ organisation, union and workplace, to give a clear expression to the rising anger in society, and direct it against the culprits responsible for the barbarism now rising around us: our imperialist ruling classes.
The pace of history is accelerating
“May you live in interesting times”: this saying, supposedly taken from an ancient Chinese curse, sums up our epoch. Anyone who imagined they could live a simple, quiet life is in for a disappointment.
The pace of history is accelerating. Events are rushing forward and crashing into each other like a highway pileup.
The ruling class in the West is going through a historic crisis of its parties and institutions. The elections taking place in a record number of countries this year are acting as a catalyst for a political crisis that has been brewing for a long time—the political expression of capitalism’s existential crisis.
In the U.K., the Conservative Party, that pillar of the capitalist system since 1834, has suffered its worst defeat ever.
In France, the far right came within a hair’s breadth of a parliamentary majority, while the legislature is in complete deadlock, with no solution in sight.
In the United States, events have taken a dramatic turn with the assassination attempt on Trump. His victory on Nov. 4 is now virtually assured. The ruling class is in a panic. Biden was forced to step down after his disastrous debate performance. The Democrats are now reluctantly rallying behind Kamala Harris, but no one seems confident about her as a candidate.
Trump’s rhetoric about being the target of the “deep state” appears vindicated: that he is the scourge of the established order, against whom the enemies of the American people are ready to do anything, from prosecution to attempted assassination. The far right will be strengthened and will feel justified in going on the offensive.
Trump in power will carry out serious attacks on workers, women and minorities, and the labor movement will have a duty to mobilize massively to block them. But that’s not what scares the ruling class.
The danger for them is that Trump’s presidency will massively accelerate the radicalization of the American masses. He is completely unpredictable and shows no regard for any of the traditional institutions of the bourgeois state, and workers will stop respecting them on a mass scale too. He’s an arsonist throwing fuel on the fire of revolution.
Canada is not isolated from this radicalization process. The border between the two countries is extremely porous.
While the crisis is not as advanced in Canada, there’s no shortage of combustible material.
The housing crisis in particular weighs heavily on the conscience of millions of working class families. No wonder Pierre Poilievre, this cheap Canadian copy of Trump, is hammering away at this issue. But neither his idiotic libertarian proposals nor the Liberal half-baked measures will solve the crisis. No one in Canada’s ruling class really wants to tackle it.
The slaughter in Palestine, too, which continues with appalling persistence, is provoking a boiling anger in millions of young people and workers. They see clearly the complicity of our ruling class and its parties, who continue to support Israel, and who repress those who dare to oppose this monumental crime.
The ruling class got what they wanted, with the end of the encampment movement. While several encampments chose to clear out on their own, the encampments were dealt the final blow with a scandalous police and private security crackdown at McGill University, where it all started. If we are to learn anything from this phase of the struggle, it is the need for a genuine mass movement, and not small actions by tiny cliques of activists.
Now, the next stage of the Palestine movement is clear: this fall, a student strike against the genocide must be organized. This is what communists advocate for.
Genocide, the rise of the far right, “political violence”, repression, living conditions that continue to decline: faced with these symptoms of a system on a downward spiral, the left sinks into demoralization.
The only way to maintain one’s head is to see the other side of the coin: the deep crisis in society also presents immense opportunities for revolutionaries. The ruling class is struggling to defend the legitimacy of its system. These developments are shattering the illusions of millions of people in the institutions of capitalism.
If more and more people are turning to demagogues, it’s because they know the situation can’t go on like this. Defenders of the status quo look even crazier than Trump.
What’s missing is for communists to organize and show the way out of this rotting system. We need to explain relentlessly that the root cause of people’s problems lies in the crisis of capitalism.
To paraphrase Marx, beneath the surface, in the consciousness of millions, the old mole of revolution is digging, digging, digging, undermining the ideological foundations of the system. And history is accelerating. We need to have a sense of urgency. Revolutions happen with as much certainty as the seasons. But it’s up to us to be ready to lead the next one to victory.
This is the editorial for Issue #7 of Communist Revolution.
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